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"Colonization rears its ugly head whenever there is “globalization.” In the 1500s, several European nations were aggressively globalizing, especially Spain, and especially in the Americas. At the time of Christopher Columbus’s westward wanderings, the Americas already had strong indigenous cultures. There was a great fondness for music and dancing, especially for rituals and celebrations.

We often wonder how to involve our younger "up and coming" and inspired musicians in our performance programs. Here, as example of a successful option to youth involvement, is a snapshot of the "Monteverdi Apprentices Programme" established in 2007.

"The aim of the Apprentices Programme is to recruit the most promising young performers – those on the verge of entering the profession – and introduce them to the musical tradition of the Monteverdi Choir and the working practices of Sir John Eliot Gardiner by way of a year-long apprenticeship, involving participation in the Monteverdi Choir, English Baroque Soloists and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique projects, as well as additional mentoring and coaching sessions with the Monteverdi musical staff. ...

"Our Christmas programme this year features works by Jacob Clemens and his Franco-Flemish contemporaries. Clemens’s music is polyphonic perfection: unlike most northern European composers of the time he never travelled to Italy; he revels in relatively conservative close-worked counterpoint and sonorous chording. ...

As you may or may not know, Sagittarius is in its final throes of its illustrious 30th season which ends this December 2016. If you would like to take part in hearing them live and in performance, you will want to visit their site and purchase tickets to their 2 remaining concert events before they are all sold-out. It will be with sadness and with fond farewells that we see the members of the organization close its doors. ...

"In his November 9th piece for Deadline Hollywood, Jeremy Gerard reports that the bottom is falling out for serious arts criticism at The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Reviewerswill be fighting for their existence in the online equivalent of journalistic death cage matches: picked off in hybrid lifestyle sections, such as the Journal‘s new “Life and Arts.” And that fade-out encourages publications lower on the food chain to ditch arts criticism, if they haven’t already. Or it serves as an excuse to let reviews gently dangle over the edge of the cliff, as The Boston Globe is doing with its move to have non-profit organizations pay for arts criticism. ...

"We’re delighted to announce that one of our very exciting Future Baroque artists, soprano Rowan Pierce, will perform for us at our Festival Launch on Monday 23 January. She will be joined by members of the Medici Ensemble, with whom she made such a great impression on the audience at their lunchtime concert at the 2015 Festival. The Launch event will take place at the East India Club, 16 St James's Square, St. James's, London SW1Y 4LH. We're immensely grateful to Philip and Christine Miles for hosting this event. ...

A benefit performance of Downland, Byrd, and Holborne in support of Salon/Sanctuary Concerts

"Works of Holborne, Byrd, and the great John Dowland, a Catholic exile from the Protestant court of Elizabeth I, form this program to be performed by "Living Legend" Hopkinson Smith, as a benefit event for Salon/Sanctuary Concerts. ...

"When the members of Bay Area baroque ensemble Musica Pacifica put together their program for the opening of the 40th season of the S.F. Early Music Society, little could they have suspected that sacred and secular music from 17th century Italy would offer much needed distraction, comfort and soothing in the wake of an emotionally turbulent week. ...

"The appearing of wound strings caused, starting from the end of the 17th century, the definitive abandoning of the ancient manufacturing techniques of the traditional all-gut bass strings.

This explains why modern plain gut strings fail to produce an acceptable acoustical performance in the low registers, thus making it unavoidable to use wound strings for musical repertoires that actually pre-date their historical appearing; this, in turn, causes an obvious philological paradox as well as serious tone and balance problems between high and low registers, especially on Lutes. ...

For those of you in the Washington D.C area, you may want to take a closer look at this group's concert line-ups.

About Aberfoyle Baroque: "Jessica Honigberg and Carolyn Winter launched Aberfoyle Baroque aiming to promote the harpsichord through performance and education in the greater Washington DC metropolitan area. They believe this magnificent and versatile instrument should be enjoyed by a wider audience than is currently the case. ...

"Following on the 2015 release of Mozart’s Requiem, Masaaki Suzuki and his Bach Collegium Japan has gone on to record the composers Mass in C minor, K427 – the ‘Great Mass’. As the nickname indicates it is a work of unusual proportions for a mass of the Classical period. ....

"One fine morning in the summer of 1904 a van drew up at our door and from it emerged Arnold Dolmetsch and a harpsichord. He had previously asked me to play in Bach’s Double Concerto in C major with Miss [Kathleen] Salmon at one of his concerts in Clifford’s Inn. As I had no knowledge of the harpsichord, it was a case of “fools rushing in”. However, all went well at the concert as far as the ensemble was concerned, and the result was that it fired me with a desire to possess an instrument of my own.

Thus Nellie Chaplin opens a fascinating article, “The harpsichord”, which she wrote in 1922 for the journal Music and Letters (3: 3, July 1922, pp. 269–73), describing her first encounter with the harpsichord and her subsequent commitment to exploring both music and dance of the pre-Classical period. ...

"The principal attraction on this occasion was Haydn’s intermezzo, La canterina (The singer) which Classical Opera have recently performed at the Eisenstadt Haydn Festival.

Opera is not the first genre that comes to mind in connection with Haydn, but the composer wrote (according to Grove) thirty dramatic works for the stage, most of which date from the period when he was in the employ of the Princes Esterházy ...

"A Cambridge academic believes he has discovered Thomas Becket’s personal book of psalms, an ancient manuscript the martyred saint and so-called “turbulent priest” may have been holding when he was murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170. ...

"Neville Marriner, the British violinist-turned-conductor who founded the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and built it into one of the most popular and widely recorded chamber orchestras in the world, died Oct. 2. He was 92.

The academy announced the death in a statement on its website. No other details were immediately available. ...

"Choosing a different path from the more conventionally traveled road is a matter of pride for many musicians and listeners who are deeply involved in early music. Particularly during the early days of the revival, those who were attracted to the more transparent sound of gut-strung fiddles were dismissed by the mainstream as non-serious musicians, and modern masters even claimed that the artistic potential of J.S. Bach's works for solo violin could not possibly have been correctly realized until said masters arrived on the scene with their more highly evolved instruments, reliable strings, and 19th-century technique. ...

"The pieces recorded here have been played on a peculiar instrument, which was quite widespread in the second half of the 18th century: the tangent piano (Tangentenflügel). It is a piano whose strings are struck by wooden slips without any soft coverings. In place of the rotating motion of the common piano’s hammers, the Tangent piano has strikers that move perpendicularly to the strings like a harpsichord jacks. ...

To celebrate 20 years of 19th century dances here in Rome, under the expert guidance of Maestro Paolo Di Segni, we will welcome you at the Auditorium delle Fornaci, just off St. Peter’s square.

The musicians of the Orchestra del Teatro della Memoria will accompany our steps, with their usual flair and good humor: the Maestri, we know from experience, are quite ready to join us on the dance floor! ...

"In October 2014, the Oxford Lieder Festival - under its imaginative and intrepid founder, Sholto Kynoch - fulfilled an incredibly ambitious goal: to perform Schubert’s entire corpus of songs - more than 600 - and, for three marvellous weeks, to bring Vienna to Oxford. ‘The Schubert Project’ was a magnificent celebration of the life and music of Franz Schubert: at its core lay the first complete performance of Schubert’s songs - including variants and alternative versions - in the UK....

CALL FOR PROPOSALS

The 6th annual meeting of the Historical Keyboard Society of North America (HKSNA) will be held from Wednesday, April 26 to Saturday, April 29, 2017 in Greenville, South Carolina. The meeting’s theme, "From the Old World to the New," aims to encourage the study of keyboard music and keyboard making in England and the Americas from 1700–1850. Selected instruments from the Carolina Clavier Collection will be featured in this meeting. ...

"We are emailing you today to tell you about some changes to the way we sell our digital downoads. You may have noticed that our downloads are no longer available from www.thesixteendigital.com,this is because we have moved them to our main website where we can sell them alongside our CDs. ...

"A three day event with focus on Dance, music and opera in the Europe of Enlightenment

Hosted in some of the most fascinating historical buildings in the city of Naples (Teatro di San Carlo, Palazzo Zevallos Stigliano, Chiesa di Santa Caterina da Siena) the international conference Il mondo di Gennaro Magri: Danza, musica e opera a Napoli, nell’Europa dei Lumi will take place from October 6 to 8, centering on the figure of the famous choreographer active during the 18th century as maître de ballet at Teatro di San Carlo in Naples and author of Trattato teorico-pratico di ballo (Napoli 1779). ...

"This hour on Harmonia, we continue our 3-part celebration of the British-based viol consort Fretwork. In honor of its thirtieth anniversary, we’re exploring Fretwork’s experiences with 500 or so years of rich repertory, ripe for viols. Our featured release, only slightly ironically, is John Jenkins: Six-Part Consorts, performed by Phantasm. ...

"Shortly after moving in to her new home, Mottisfont Abbey, the indomitable Maud Russell noted in her engagement book:

April 4 1935. Take boys to Londonderry House to hear Mrs Woodhouse.

Maud, a wealthy heiress, was married to Major Gilbert Russell, a banker and cousin of the Duke of Bedford. They purchased the entire estate of Mottisfont in 1934. They also maintained a London address, as was traditional for the upper classes at the time, enabling them to partake fully in fashionable artistic and political circles.

Raymond Russell (1922-1964), their youngest son, was 13 at the time of this entry and just about to start at Eton College, Windsor. A trip to hear Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, Britain’s foremost exponent of the harpsichord and clavichord at the time, would have undoubtedly been a memorable and inspirational experience for this musical and intense child. ...

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